On a Good Wicket

When I last left off on Monday night we were cooking chili. The chili didn't really turn out as good as we expected. It tasted really good but the texture was awful. We bought dehydrated beans at the market and didn't realize until it was much too late that we were supposed to soak them for like 24 hours or something. It turned our pretty crunchy. The rest of the night was pretty boring. We didn't go out like we had planned because we were all too tired. So we just stayed in and watched some rugby.

The next day I woke up around 7am, had some nutella on toast (which is awesome hazelnut spread, try it if you haven't already), and left around 8am. The five of us tried an alternate route by taking the train to Box Hill and then a bus to Burrville. It really wasn't worth it. Took about the same amount of time except with more waiting and running around. I think I'm just going to take the tram from now on even if it's slow.

When we got to our office we continued our work on the interview plan for the training instructor interviews we have planned for Friday. By mid-day we had finished that and scheduled an appointment for after lunch to review it with John Butler, one of our sponsors. We headed out to a near by cafe for lunch and I had some tortellini with bacon which was really good.

So it's been brought to my attention that some of you don't know what my project is about. I'm going to take a little break in my story here to tell you. Basically, the CFA or Country Fire Authority is the largest fire protection agency in the state of Victoria. It's government and corporately funded and it has a work force of approximately 60,000 volunteer firefighters. Wildfires are a big problem here, sorta like in California. Recently the CFA has had a lot of complaints from the volunteers about their training. Our project is to somehow evaluate those concerns and complaints; determining approximately how widespread they are, what exactly are the concerns and complaints, and what the sources of the problems are. In order to complete this task we'll be using several different methods. The first couple of weeks will be spent interviewing training instructors, conducting volunteer firefighter focus groups, and meeting with the CFA's Managers of Training and Development. The data collected from those methods will be used to create a phone and online survey of volunteer firefighters. From there we'll analyze the data, draw conclusions, and present a report to the CFA detailing our research and results.

After lunch, we met with John Butler and he gave us some useful insight to edit our interview plan with. For example, instead of asking the instructors which brigades do they train; John gave us a memo detailing what's called risk categories of brigades and we can get more useful information by asking them which risk categories of brigades they train. He also suggested that instead of asking about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during and after training, we ask about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during training and during assessment. After our meeting with John we spent another hour or so editing the plan and adding the privacy statement to it.

After we completed the interview plan we began working on our demographics targeting plan for our phone survey. Even though the phone survey is a couple of weeks off we need to begin working on the targeting plan right away because it's a crucial part of our project. Basically, for those of you who have taken statistics it's what is known as a stratified random sample. For those of you who haven't it creates a crossection of the sample being studied. For example if the CFA consists of 25% women then our sample should contain 25% women. The demographics we're targeting are gender, age, and region. Our targeted sample size is 250 people. We made a really cool table outlining how we plan obtain our target with all of the demographics represented. We got a report from human resources detailing the percentages of our demographics and from there it was just math.

The ride home was long and boring as usual. However did see some like 14 year old kids drinking SoCo and Cola cans. When we got back, Max and I had a meeting with our advisers to talk about methodology and our paper. It was boring and definately not useful. I swear Lemone and Salazar have to be the dumbest professors on campus and we end up with them as our advisers. After the meeting ended (7:30-8:00pmish) I went to finally get something to eat. We ran out of food for meals so it was everyone for themselves. I made ham and eggs which was ok. The best part about it was I didn't burn it or the food. A couple of us went out around 9pm to get some ice cream and explore a little. We got some ice cream and hit up china town. Lots of restaurants and live tanks. The china town aquarium was pretty cool. It made our bass tank this past summer look like a mansion. Fish we absolutely packed into tanks. Pretty funny. Went to bed early, around 11. I'm hoping to do more demographic targeting in work today and we have our first Sponsor and Adviser meeting today, which should be awful. Anyways I'll write more tomorrow, later.

p.s. I'll try to get pictures up soon but I don't have a cable for the camera so I'll have to buy one.